Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Standard Equipment 37natural selection of replicators, the only nonmiraculous natural processwe know of that can manufacture well-functioning machines. The organismappears as if it was designed to see well now because it owes its existenceto the success of its ancestors in seeing well in the past. (Thispoint will be expanded in Chapter 3.)Many people acknowledge that natural selection is the artificer of thebody but draw the line when it comes to the human mind. The mind,they say, is a by-product of a mutation that enlarged the head, or is aclumsy programmer's hack, or was given its shape by cultural rather thanbiological evolution. Tooby and Cosmides point out a delicious irony.The eye, that most uncontroversial example of fine engineering by naturalselection, is not just any old organ that can be sequestered withflesh and bone, far away from the land of the mental. It doesn't digestfood or, except in the case of Superman, change anything in the physicalworld. What does the eye do? The eye is an organ of information processing,firmly connected to—anatomically speaking, a part of—thebrain. And all those delicate optics and intricate circuits in the retina donot dump information into a yawning empty orifice or span some Cartesianchasm from a physical to a mental realm. The receiver of this richlystructured message must be every bit as well engineered as the sender.As we have seen in comparing human vision and robot vision, the partsof the mind that allow us to see are indeed well engineered, and there isno reason to think that the quality of engineering progressively deterioratesas the information flows upstream to the faculties that interpretand act on what we see.The adaptationist program in biology, or the careful use of naturalselection to reverse-engineer the parts of an organism, is sometimesridiculed as an empty exercise in after-the-fact storytelling. In the satireof the syndicated columnist Cecil Adams, "the reason our hair is brownis that it enabled our monkey ancestors to hide amongst the coconuts."Admittedly, there is no shortage of bad evolutionary "explanations." Whydo men avoid asking for directions? Because our male ancestors mighthave been killed if they approached a stranger. What purpose does musicserve? It brings the community together. Why did happiness evolve?Because happy people are pleasant to be around, so they attracted moreallies. What is the function of humor? To relieve tension. Why do peopleoverestimate their chance of surviving an illness? Because it helps themto operate effectively in life.These musings strike us as glib and lame, but it is not because they